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The Jean Herbison Lecture

The cultural myths and the realities of teaching and learning

Graham Nuthall

University of Canterbury

December 2001

In this talk I want to pick up the theme of this conference – that culture forms and

informs learning – and look at how culture shapes our understanding of both the

teaching and learning process.

One of the most significant things about culture is that it becomes so much a part of

ourselves that we can no longer see it for what it is. The more familiar it is, the more

it is like the air we breathe the harder it is for us to see it.

School teaching is like that. We all spend at least 10 of the most formative years of

our life in school. We all become, through this common experience, experts in what it

means to be a teacher and a student. As we often jokingly complain, everyone is an

expert on schooling.

I have been involved in research on teaching and learning in classrooms for about 40

years, and it has taken that long for me to understand just how much of what we do in

schools is a matter of cultural tradition rather than evidence-based practice. And how

much of what we believe about teaching is a matter of folk-lore rather than research.

In order to explain this, I want to take you on a journey. Instead of logically

explaining the case with argument and evidence, I would want to trace the voyage of

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discovery that I experienced as I attempted to find out how teachers shape student

learning.

I want to do this, not just because it might be an interesting story, or a challenging

intellectual exercise, but because I want to make it clear that so long as we are

unaware of the extent to which culture determines how we practice and think about

teaching, we will remain locked in a system that inevitably produces failure and

inequalities.

The direction the journey took was not planned. The path was determined by the

discoveries I made, by the colleagues I had the good fortune to work with, and by the

accidents and opportunities that emerged along the way.

The journey begins with a tape-recorder (1960-1968).

The journey began when I was a graduate student and persuaded a group of

experienced teachers to let me bring a tape-recorder into their classrooms and hang up

microphones on bits of string from their light-fittings. Analyzing these first tape-

recordings led me to discover that, for all its apparent spontaneity, the way teachers

interacted with their students followed fixed patterns and conventions. Even when a

teacher was being very sensitive to the individual needs and interests of her or his

students, the interaction took place within predictable structures and rules of social

interaction. Like language, teaching has its own underlying grammatical rules.

I later discovered, working in the Unites States, that these patterns or routines

occurred in essentially the same form across different countries and languages.

Stenographic records of teaching made in the early 1900’s, showed that the essentials

of these patterns already had a very long history.

Although we did not think this way at the time, we had, in fact, discovered that

teaching was a kind of cultural ritual.

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Learning that experience makes no difference (1968 – 1974).

The next stage in the journey occurred when I returned to New Zealand and worked

with colleagues at the College of Education to find out how our understanding of the

underlying patterns of teaching could be incorporated into the training of teachers.

We tried out several ideas including training the students to analyze recordings of

their own teaching.

Working with Cliff Wright at the Teachers’ College, we decided to find out if this

training made a difference to the way they taught, and the effect they had on student

learning. We worked with a group of teachers that included some who had been

trained to analyze recordings of their own teaching, a matched sample of other

beginning teachers, and a group of very experienced teachers who were experts in

science teaching (in those days called nature study specialists). Each of the teachers

taught the same material on the life of the black-backed seagull in their own way.

We tested the students’ learning and used tape-recorders to get an exact record of how

the teachers interacted with their students. We compared the teachers and related what

they did to what their students learned. This was well-designed study in which we

identified significant aspects of the effects of the teachers on their students.

But, to our surprise, there were no discernable differences between the experienced

teachers and the beginning teachers in what they did or what their students learned.

Being an experienced expert teacher apparently made no difference.

Again, although we did not understand the significance of it at the time, we had

stumbled across evidence that the basic patterns of teaching are carried out in much

the same way, with much the same effects, by novices and experts alike. The

underlying patterns of teaching are independent of training and experience.

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The journey splits in two: The experimental studies (1974 – 1980)

At this point, the journey took two different directions that later joined up again. In

one branch of the journey, I worked with John Church and David Hughes as they

designed and carried out experimental studies of the effects of teaching on student

learning.

In the other branch, I set out to review the published research on teaching and write a

book for teachers on what the research had to say about how to teach.

Experimental studies seemed like the way to go. The problem with studies like the

one Cliff Wright and I did, is that you cannot be sure you are not overlooking an

important aspect of teaching. The components of teaching that Cliff and I identified

as important could have been merely symptoms of something else much more

important, that we were not aware of.

John Church and David Hughes worked from recordings of experienced teachers, and

developed scripts to structure their own teaching. These scripts ensured that they

followed predetermined patterns but could still respond spontaneously within those

patterns. Recordings of their scripted teaching were indistinguishable from everyday

teaching.

They were both very successful sets of experiments. They discovered the effects on

student learning of using different types of questions, different types of feed-back,

and different ways of managing student participation. To my knowledge, they were

the most brilliantly designed experimental studies of teaching that have ever been

carried out.

But there were problems. Because of the very precise and careful way they designed

their experiments, they uncovered the enormous complexity of teaching. Going down

that track would have meant carrying out hundreds of large scale experimental studies

just to begin to study some of the different ways teachers interacted with their

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students. For example, John Church taught in all the available Year 5 classes in the

city of Christchurch to study the interactive effects of four different types of teacher

behaviour.

I began to realize that the end product of this kind of research would be an enormous

list of experimentally validated do’s and don’ts. If teachers could digest such a long

list, it would turn them into robots. I realized I was following a path that satisfied the

cultural rituals of the research community, but would be of little value, and probable

harm, to teachers.

The question started going round in my mind – what is it that teachers need to make

their teaching more effective? And how could I design research methods that would

meet their needs?

The other branch of the journey: A book about research on teaching (1974 – 1980)

On the other branch of my journey, I was searching the literature for studies that

would throw light on the way teaching shaped student learning. I wanted to know all

that research could tell me. What I found was a field in which the findings were

extremely varied and often contradictory.

I reached the conclusion that only studies that involved what teachers and students did

in classrooms would ever be useful, but even then, there was surprisingly little that

was both consistent and relevant.

At that time, I developed the belief that the essence of good research is producing

results that can be replicated. You cannot expect a teacher to try out a new method if

the results of research on that method are just a one-off accident. And it is

irresponsible to use research to change what teachers do unless you have some

certainty that you know the effects on students.

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Unfortunately, we almost never repeat studies to find out if the results can be

reproduced in other contexts. We are always carrying out exploratory studies, or one-

off studies in which we use statistical procedures to determine the value of the results.

But the statistical tests that we use assume replicability. They do not prove it, or even

establish its probability.

At that time I knew, or had contact with, the majority of those who were involved in

classroom-based research on teaching. I managed to persuade many of them to send

me their original data so that I could find out for myself, how comparable the results

of different studies actually were. It was a depressing activity. There was almost no

comparability between the different sets of data, and nothing I felt I could put in the

book and be reasonably sure that a teacher could rely on the results.

After a lot of detailed work I abandoned the book. I put the chapters I had written in a

drawer and I wrote an article entitled “Is classroom interaction research worth the

effort involved?” It detailed the inconsistencies in the data in the different studies.

And I took up painting.

The journey reaches its lowest point: Searching for the right methods

This was the lowest point in the journey. If ever there was a time in the desert, then

this was it. I was not sure that research on teaching could ever produce reliable and

useful results. What is more, the painstaking research that we had done by that time

was being publicly attacked for being mindless dust-bowl empiricism, even fascist in

intent.

But these criticisms contained a very good point. Teaching is a very personal and

individual thing. To be valid, research on teaching must include the subjective and

personal elements of what goes on between teachers and their students.

But that just redefined the problem. How was I to include the subjective and the

personal but still produce results that were reliable and replicable?

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Meanwhile, the journals continued to publish studies that showed statistically

significant results. Books were published that listed these results, glossing over

inconsistencies as the errors we ought to expect in such a messy and complex area.

But, there were no systematic programmes of research. Very few did more than one

study and never confronted the problems of replication.

The journey takes a new turn: Studying student learning (1978 – 1984).

A way out of this wilderness came through working with another graduate student.

Adrienne Alton-Lee was an experienced teacher who was concerned about how little

she knew about student learning. She knew how to manage a class. She knew how to

interest and engage the students in learning activities. What she did not know was

why a particular student did not learn a particular concept when other students did.

She designed her PhD thesis so that she could follow the learning experiences of

individual students. With two other observers, she made continuous written records of

the behaviours of three students in a Year 4 class, during a unit on environmental

issues.

The major contribution that Adrienne made was her invention of what she called the

“item-file”. This was a data file made up of the records, both objective and subjective,

of every experience a student had that related in any way to the learning of a single

concept. Each item-file was, as far as possible, the complete life history of a single

concept in the mind and experience of an individual student.

(Please note that I am using the term ‘concept’ as a short-hand for all the different

kinds of knowledge, understandings and skills that are significant in areas like

science, social studies, and mathematics).

Because these item files contained every detail of the students’ experiences, they gave

a sense of being as valid and sensitive to the real lives of students as any research in

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this field had ever been. And analyzing them produced some very interesting

characteristics of student learning.

Although Adrienne’s thesis was, in many ways, a brilliant success, and some of the

results were published in a well-respected international journal, I had doubts about

whether her results from just three students in one classroom were enough.

The journey continues through three replications (1984 – 1990)

So the journey, for the next 8 to 10 years was spent carrying out three increasingly

sophisticated replications of Adrienne’s original design. Roger Corbett helped

enormously by designing individual miniature microphones for each student to wear.

He worked out ways of mounting multiple sets of small video-cameras to supplement

the live observations. We were now able to study every kind of classroom activity.

The first thing that became apparent from this very detailed data was how little

teachers knew about what was going on in their classrooms. We found that even live

observers keeping continuous written records of the behaviours of individual students

missed up to 40% of what was recorded on the students’ individual microphones.

We began to realize that students live in a personal and social world of their own in

the classroom. They whisper to each other and pass notes. They spread rumours about

girlfriends and boyfriends, they organize their after-school social life, continue

arguments that started in the playground. They care more about how their peers

evaluate their behaviour than they care about the teacher’s judgement. Within this

pervasive peer culture, sexism and racism can be alive and flourishing even when the

teacher actively promotes fully inclusive learning activities.

I also came to realise that student learning is a very individual thing. Students already

know at least 40-50% of what teachers intend them to learn. Consequently they spend

a lot of time in activities that relate to what they already know and can do. But this

prior knowledge is specific to individual students and the teacher cannot assume that

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more than a tiny fraction is common to the class as a whole. As consequence at least a

third of what a student learns is unique to that student, and the rest is learned by no

more than three or four others.

Understanding the function of the standard rituals of teaching

I now began to understand the function of the standard patterns or routines of

teaching and why they had such control over teachers’ behaviour. In order to manage

a class of 25 to 35 students, all of whom have different knowledge, skills, interests

and motivations, teachers have to focus on the performance of the class as a whole. It

is impossible to focus on the individual learning of any one student for more than

very brief periods.

Students learn how to manage their own private and social agendas within the

standard patterns of teaching. They learn how and when the teacher will notice them

and how to give the appearance of active involvement. They get upset and anxious if

they notice that the teacher is keeping more than a passing eye on them.

One way to understand this is to think of the class as an orchestra following a musical

score. So long as everyone knows their parts, the whole works together effectively,

and the conductor does not need to pay attention to individual players unless

something goes wrong.

Furthermore, when an orchestra is working well together, the coherent sound of the

whole orchestra makes it extraordinarily difficult to separate out the sounds of

individual instruments. If teaching is like conducting an orchestra, then it must be

primarily about group management and must follow predictable patterns.

Discovering how students learn from classroom experience (1990-1995).

The next stage in my journey occurred during 1990 when I took study leave to work

full-time on analyzing the data from the three studies. My primary focus was on the

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factors that affected student learning. For nine months of that study leave, I did

nothing else but analyse that data. I used everything I knew about formal and informal

data analysis, producing endless computer printouts and pads full of notes. But

gradually it dawned on me that for all the richness of the data we had obtained, the

old problem still remained. Adrienne’s PhD results did not reappear, and each of the

new studies produced different results.

I kept thinking that if I added in more variables, included more detail, some kind of

patterns would emerge. But they didn’t. At this point in the journey, it seemed that

unless we could get inside the minds of students, we would never understand exactly

how learning occurred.

But I decided, just to see what it would look like, to take one student’s learning of one

concept, and see if I could make sense of what was going on in that student’s mind. It

was a boy, code-named John, and it was am item-file about recent migration to New

York.

Then the obvious started to dawn on me. Learning is usually a progressive change in

what we know or can do. What creates or shapes that learning is a sequence of events

or experiences, each one building on the effects of the previous one. What happens at

one point in the sequence is different from what happens at another point. None of the

methods of data analysis that anyone had used allowed for that possibility.

It also dawned on me that what is important about a student’s experiences is the

information that she or he can extract from those experiences. It is less important

what student is doing, or what resources the student is using, or any of the other

contextual aspects of the experience. What matters is the sense the student is making

of the experience.

In hind-sight, this seems very obvious, but it shows how caught up you can get in the

culture of the research community. In our desire to focus on general variables of

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theoretical significance that are relevant across many different contexts, we have been

blind to the significance of the particular.

So I developed a way of identifying the information that students extract from their

experiences, and a way of classifying the content, timing and sequencing of that

information. To give a simple example, if a student is expected to learn that

Antarctica is the driest of all the continents, there are many different kinds of relevant

information. The student might read or hear about the kinds of storms they have in

Antarctica. The student might see a video showing how the members of an expedition

in Antarctica coped with the weather conditions. Or the teacher might tell the students

that, despite what everyone thinks, there is less rainfall in Antarctica than there is in

the Sahara desert. Each of these kinds of information is relevant, but in different

ways, and to a different extent.

My study of John showed that when he learned a concept, he had experienced the

complete set of information he needed to fully understand the concept, at least three

times. Each complete set of information could come from a single experience or

could be made up of different kinds of information coming from different experiences

at different times. Without the three sets of complete information, he did not learn the

concept. It was as simple as that

Predicting what students will and will not learn.

This provided the basis for a set of rules for determining when a student had

encountered sufficient information to understand, learn and remember a concept. I

applied these rules to the experiences of the other three students in John’s class, made

some minor adaptations and then used them to predict exactly what concepts the

students in the other two studies would learn or not learn.

These rules worked. They successfully predicted, with about 80 to 85% success the

learning of nearly 500 concepts through the experiences of eleven children, in the

three different classrooms. It involved a lot of detailed work but it was replication of

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the kind I had never seen before. It was at last a logical method that fitted the

problem.

This was the first major discovery that I had made. There was nothing in anybody

else’s research that looked anything like this. Maybe now the journey was headed in

the right direction. I had found a way of relating student experience to student

learning. But I still had to connect student experience to teaching.

Discovering how students answer tests.

Another significant discovery occurred at this time. We had been very careful to try to

find out exactly what each student knew and had learned. We not only used very

carefully developed and administered paper and pencil tests, but also extensive

individual interviews with students that explored their learning experiences and their

knowledge and understanding in greater depth. This allowed us to look closely at how

the students answered paper and pencil tests, and how they responded in interviews.

Out of this analysis came the understanding that testing is like interviewing. Both

depend on the relationship between tester and student. How the student responds

depends on the nature of that relationship and the extent to which the student and the

tester share the same perceptions of what the test or interview is about. Despite its

apparent objectivity, there is nothing more or less objective about a test than there is

about an interview. There is just a different kind of relationship between the tester and

the student.

I also came to understand that what a student knows and can do is a coherent body of

beliefs and understandings that is not the same as an adult’s view of the world, but is

nevertheless logical and consistent. Distinctions between facts, concepts, principles,

generalizations and procedures exist more in the theories of researchers than they do

in the minds of the students. Knowledge is more like a continuous landscape rather

than a set of discrete countable objects. It cannot be sensibly represented by numbers.

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This led to the conclusion that the scores that students get on standard paper and

pencil tests are primarily the result of the students’ motivations and cultural

background, and only secondarily about what the student knows or can do.

To get a sense of this, imagine a hot nor-west afternoon in a classroom with all the

windows shut to keep the wind from blowing everything around. A teacher, the class

doesn’t particularly like, or some stranger, has just handed out tests and tried to

persuade the students to do their best. Imagine a student starting off with the first few

easy questions, then as the room gets hotter and her clothes get stickier and the

questions get harder, wondering what the hell she is doing this for. She starts

doodling instead of filling in the answers and starts to realize that no one she knows

gives a damn what she does on the test. She sucks her water bottle, draws a few more

faces to keep boredom at bay, and waits for the test to be over and real life begin

again.

Which is a very good reason why most research on teacher effectiveness and most

research on student achievement (especially the large international studies such as

TIMMS and PISA), because they depend on paper and pencil tests that have no

personal significance for students, are never likely to produce valid results.

The journey takes a dramatic turn: Identifying the role of ability (1995 – 1998)

But the journey gets more exciting and disturbing at this point. Adrienne and I carried

out two further studies that focused on gender and curriculum issues. These studies

allowed me to develop and extend the rules to cover further kinds of learning and to

test their predictive validity with older students learning different kinds of concepts.

Again they worked just as well. The procedure was now objective enough to be

computerized. The tally was now 1100 different concepts, learned or not learned by

21 students in 11 different classrooms.

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However, when somebody asked me to explain what effect intelligence had on

learning, I had to reply that as far as I could tell, from our data, none at all. The same

rules worked equally well for both the more able and the less able students

But our data did show that the more able students started with more background

knowledge and ended up learning more than the less able students.

This started me comparing the experiences of different students when they were

engaged in the same activities. What I found was that a large proportion of each

student’s significant learning experiences were either self-selected or self-generated,

even in quite traditional classrooms.

The more able students talked more amongst themselves about relevant content. They

asked more questions and persisted with problems for a longer time. They seemed to

be more interested, more persistent, and less likely to be distracted. There was no

evidence that they found the tasks easier, or had less difficulties. There was no

evidence that their minds processed their experience differently. The difference was

in the way they managed their involvement in classroom activities.

It was Piaget’s work that provided the metaphor that helped me understand the

problem. Piaget was originally a biologist, and began his work on the development of

mind in the belief that as the digestive system processes and extracts what it needs

from food, so the mind extracts and digests what it needs from experience.

Within reasonable limits, the learning process, like the metabolic processes that take

place in the body, is universal across our species. How the metabolic process actually

works in our bodies depends on what we eat and drink. So it is with the learning

process. Although it always operates in the same way, we can, as it were, choose our

mental diet, feeding or starving our minds of its essential nutrients.

So those students whose backgrounds provide them with the cultural knowledge and

skills to use the classroom and its activities for their own purposes, learn more than

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those who dutifully do what they are told but do not want, or know how, to create

their own opportunities. Differences in intelligence are more likely to be the product

of differences in classroom experiences than the other way round.

The journey again splits (1990 – 2000)

At this point, my journey again split into two parallel directions. Along one branch of

the journey, I started to look more closely at the rituals that make up classroom life. If

Vygotsky is right, then students minds develop by internalizing the social rituals of

classroom life. If we want to understand how classroom experiences shape students

thinking and the way their minds process experience, we need to know exactly what

these social rituals or routines are. I already had a clear understanding of the recurring

patterns of whole class activities, but needed to discover the recurring patterns of

small group and individual activities.

Learning from experienced teachers

The other branch of the journey came from my experiences with graduate students. I

developed a course on research on teaching for experienced teachers and lecturers. It

was a practical course and I learned a lot from the students about the nature of

teaching and how experienced teachers think about their teaching.

Two assignments in particular provided significant insights. In one assignment, I

asked the graduate students to interview fellow teachers about how they knew when

their teaching was going well. The teacher was asked to describe an actual incident

when their teaching went especially well, then describe how they knew it was going

well.

What was fascinating about that assignment was that it always (over more than a

dozen years) produced the same results, with minor variations depending on the age

of the students in the teachers’ classes. Almost every teacher knew their teaching was

going well from signs of students’ engagement. It was the look in the students’ eyes,

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the questions they asked, the fact that they didn’t stop talking about the topic or

problem when they left the classroom. In short, by the feel and sounds of interest and

focused busyness. In most teachers minds, the criteria for successful learning were the

same as the criteria for successful management.

The second assignment I set my class was much more difficult. I asked them to carry

out research on their own teaching. They could take any small teaching activity or

procedure, measure what three or four students learned from that activity, and relate,

in some direct way, what happened in the activity to what the students experienced

and learned.

Despite instructions and discussion with me, many of the graduate teachers and

lecturers carried out the assignment in the same way. They recorded what they and

their students did together and created an outcome test to measure what the students

learned. They then related the students’ scores on the test to indicators of how

engaged the students were in the teaching or learning activity. And they found that the

more engaged the student, the higher the score on the test.

It was difficult for me to explain and hard for these experienced teachers to

understand that I wanted them to do more than that.

The problem with that kind of study is that it is not directly about learning. It is about

classroom management. In order to relate teaching to learning, you need to know how

a student’s knowledge or skills have changed and what specifically caused that

change to occur. Being busy is not a cause of learning unless you know exactly what

information or knowledge the student is getting out of being busy. To give a simple

example, it is not enough to say that a student was busy reading unless you also

describe what the student was reading and how that related to what the student

learned or failed to learn.

What I learned from these graduate students and the difficulties we had

communicating with each other was that the practice of teaching, as we commonly

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understand and talk about it, is not about learning. The focus of teachers’ thinking

when they are planning and carrying out their role in the classroom is keeping

students busily engaged in activities that produce some tangible product that may or

may not reflect, in some indirect and unobservable way, student learning.

As a deputy principal of a large high school, said in his evaluation of the course: “I

realized I had not really consciously thought about what effective teaching is … I had

made the assumption that because I was teaching, the children were learning”.

Identifying the rituals of individual and group activities (1998 - ?)

At this point, the two branches of my journey joined up again. I had become involved

with a group that was looking at the cultural and historical roots of classroom

practices. In my attempts to identify the routines and rituals of the classroom, I looked

closely at how teachers managed the activities they designed.

What was immediately apparent was that teachers do not talk to students about

learning or thinking. They talk about paying attention and not annoying others. They

talk about the resources the students will need to use, about how long the activity

should take and what will happen if it is not finished on time.

When you listen to students they talk about the same things. They are constantly

comparing how much have they done. How long will it take, do the headings have to

be underlined, where did you find that answer, do you have to write it all out, does it

have to be finished for homework?

Homework is a classic example of the way learning activities are thought about.

Everyone (parents, politicians, teachers, students) believe it is important. There is

debate about how much and how often it must be done, but giving no homework

raises suspicions about whether a teacher is doing a good job. However, nobody talks

about what or how a student learns from doing homework. Nobody cares if the

parents do most of it, not even the parents themselves. The point is that homework,

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like most classroom activities, results in a more or less beautifully presented product.

Of course there is supporting talk about it being good to keep students busy and away

from the television set, but not about the need for the specific learning that a specific

homework project might produce.

Where has the journey taken me?

Let me pause now to review where the journey has taken me to this point. The

appropriate image might be standing on an isolated hill, distant from the standard

ways of doing research, distant from the standard ways of understanding teaching and

learning, doubting the value of the accumulating bodies of published research on

teaching effectiveness, academic ability, and achievement.

First, you will have noticed a major change of direction in the middle of the journey.

To be precise, at the time of Adrienne’s Ph.D. thesis. I switched from studying

teaching to studying learning.

My primary interest was still in relating teaching to learning, but I had found that

students live in a different world from teachers and testers and researchers. If we are

to understand how teaching relates to learning, then we have to begin at the closest

point to that learning, and that is student experience.

Second, I had come to understand that there are very good reasons why teaching and

teacher managed classroom activities follow very predictable patterns that are only

indirectly related to student learning.

This is because teachers are very largely cut off from information about what

individual students are learning. Because of the numbers of students that teachers

have to manage simultaneously, and because of the individuality of student learning,

teachers must rely on routines and rituals that we believe are good for students.

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For example, many teachers make use of the class brainstorm as a routine for finding

out what students know. In a brainstorm, students are invited to contribute any or all

of the ideas they have on the topic. Typically, a few students contribute the majority

of the ideas, a few more students contribute one or two ideas, and most students are

silent. The mesmerizing power of whole-class routines, like the brainstorm, is such

that most teachers, and most observers, come away feeling they know what all the

students know.

To make matters worse, when a teacher uses a brainstorm to review and evaluate

what the students have learned from an activity, and the teacher is unaware that most

of what the contributing students learned, they learned from their own self-created

activities, the teacher will come away with an entirely false impression of the role she

or he played in the students’ learning.

However, so long as these routines and rituals are recognized by the profession and

the society at large as the right way to run classrooms, and students have learned to

expect and play the reciprocal roles that these rituals require, then teachers do not

have to pay more than passing attention to what is going on in the students minds.

Identifying the web of supporting myths: the role of ability

I also came to understand that there is a web of supporting beliefs or myths that

justify the way these rituals are played out. Possibly the most significant of these is

the concept of academic ability.

When the teacher manages the classroom so that all the students are, as far as the

teacher can see, busily engaged in appropriate activities, what can explain consistent

differences in what the students produce. The teacher is doing everything right, so

why do some fail to respond?

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The concept of inherent ability or intelligence appropriately transfers responsibility

away from the teacher’s management of classroom activities. Learning is said to be a

function of ability.

Our data, however, show that differences in what students learn, and differences in

what they do on tests, are both created by differences in how they engage with

classroom and testing activities. In both cases, these are a function of their motivation

and the extent to which they share the purposes and culture of the teacher or tester.

This is why ability tests are good predictors of results on school achievement tests,

and relate to the kinds of work that students produce in class. It all fits neatly

together, and provides the basis for depriving some students of resources, and

lowering the quality and content of what they are taught. The fact that differences in

motivation and culture are also related to differences in ethnic background and family

resources, means that the myth explains failure while protecting the real causes of that

failure. It also provides the context in which students acquire false but self-fulfilling

beliefs about their own ability.

What sustains the rituals and their supporting myths?

If the standard models of teaching and the network of myths that support them have

such a long history and have such a powerful hold over the way we organize, run and

think about schooling, what is it that sustains and promotes them?

First, our teacher education systems still reflect an apprenticeship model of training in

which the practices and beliefs of experienced teachers are taken as the ideal to be

imitated. Beginning teachers’ preoccupation with classroom management leads them

to focus on the surface features of the classrooms of experienced teachers. They long

to imitate the ease and fluency with which the experienced teacher manages her or his

class.

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The reflective teacher model that has come to dominate thinking about teacher

education and professional development for teachers, also serves to sustain the

standard routines and rituals of teaching. It presupposes that the reflective teacher has

valid information about what is happening in her or his classroom and what the

students are learning.

Most of the ways we evaluate teachers are based on the same standard models. ERO

officers are experienced teachers who base their judgments on the expected routines

and rituals of the busy active classroom. These are the routines and rituals that parents

understand and expect to see. Those teachers who perform these routines with the

most enthusiastic participation of their students are the ones who are given awards for

the quality of their teaching. Others are invited to watch and copy what these award

winning teachers do.

More significantly, the standard routines and rituals of teaching are strongly

supported by a considerable body of academic research. Ethnographic studies that are

based on teacher’s perceptions and self-reports of their own teaching serve to

elaborate and justify the standard routines and the myths that support them. Empirical

studies of the practices of the best teachers perform the same function. The best

teachers are selected by asking school principals, other teachers, or ERO officers to

identify those who are the best exponents of the standard routines and rituals. The

best descriptions of exactly what these routines consist of, and what teachers believe

about these routines, are to be found in the reports of this kind of research.

The point is that, in none of these examples, is there any direct reference to the

learning of students.

It is also significant that I had to discover how students learn in classrooms despite a

large number of textbooks on student learning. They contain theories of learning and

descriptions of how to apply them to teaching. With the exception of behaviour

modification (which is about classroom management), none of the theories in the

textbooks is based on research on students’ experiences in classrooms. It proved

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impossible to relate them in any sensible way to our data. At best what they do is

elaborate the talk about what teachers and researchers imagine goes on in classrooms.

The system in which learning does not matter.

We seem to have created a system in which it does not really matter if students learn

or fail to learn from their classroom experiences. No one is held accountable if

students fail to develop a scientific understanding of the physical world after at least

six years of systematic science teaching. It does not really matter if students leave

school knowing almost no history or geography or economics or political science, or

if students enter tertiary study without basic arithmetic skills.

What matters in the system is that numbers representing test results are recorded in

the school’s information management system. Although nobody knows what

knowledge or understandings those numbers or marks represent, they are used as the

primary evidence that we are concerned about student learning. More than that, many

seem to believe that the more of these numbers we put in the records, the better the

teaching will become.

Within such a system it is safe to talk about new ways of teaching without ever

having to establish how they might affect student learning. The theory of learning

styles is a classic example. It is strongly supported by many teacher educators without

any evidence that it relates to student learning. As far as I can tell, those teachers who

do embrace it, still engage in the established routines of teaching, but talk as though

they have a new sensitivity to the learning of individual students.

Let me make it clear that there are very good reasons for teachers staying with the

standard routines and rituals of teaching. Not only is the system and its supporting

myths designed to make it almost impossible for them to do otherwise, but it is not

clear that one teacher can possibly be responsible for the learning of 25 to 35 students

simultaneously. No one has ever given clear empirical evidence that a teacher can.

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My major concern is with the failure of the educational research community to

understand the problem that we face. As you will be able to tell, I believe in the need

to include both the subjective elements of human experience and the objective

analysis of patterns of behaviour in the same studies. The major problem we have to

deal with is disentangling the patterns that are culturally determined and hence within

our control, and the patterns that are biologically controlled, and mostly beyond our

control.

At the present time we need research that focuses on the realities of student

experience and the learning that results from that experience. That does not just mean

‘giving students a voice’. It means developing a precise and accurate, if you like,

scientific or replicable, account of the realities of their experiences. In my view, the

truth lies in the detail. Every generalization we make, every conclusion we draw,

must be true of every individual. That is what ethically responsible research in

education must be like. And, as my journey indicates, it may take a very long time

and a lot of data to begin to begin to discover the reality beneath the cultural rituals

and myths by which we live, and evaluate them for what they are.

Let’s return to that classroom on that nor’west afternoon. Someone has taken his only

pen away from the class clown. Its being passed around behind his back so that every

time he thinks he’s worked out where it is, he gets it wrong. Most of the class who

know what’s going on can barely restrain themselves from bursting into uncontrolled

giggles. The teacher thinks they are smiling in appreciation at something she has just

said that she thought was really quite clever.

In a minute or two, she will gather up the test papers and send them off to get scored,

some covered in doodles, some, like the class clown’s, largely blank. These scores

will be entered into machines where they will be transformed in complex and

sophisticated graphs and tables that politicians and newspaper editors will use to

berate and praise – you know that story.

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So long as we do not disentangle the myths from the reality we will remain slaves to a

system that inevitably produces failure and inequalities.

Selected bibliography

(these publications report results at key points along the journey)

Nuthall, G. A. & Lawrence, P.J. (1965). Thinking in the Classroom. Wellington:

New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Nuthall, G.A. (1968). Studies of teaching, II: Types of research on teaching. New

Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 3 (2), 125-147

Wright, C.J. & Nuthall, G, A. (1970). Relationships between teacher behaviors and

pupil achievement in three experimental elementary science lessons.

American Educational Research Journal, 7 (4), 477-491.

Nuthall, G.A. & Church, R. J. (1972) Experimental studies of teacher behaviour. In

G. Chanan (Ed.) Towards a Science of Teaching, pp. 9-25. London:

National Foundation for Educational Research

Hughes, D.C. (1973). An experimental investigation of the effects of pupil responding

and teacher reacting on pupil achievement. American Educational Research

Journal, 10 (1), 21-37.

Nuthall, G.A. (1974). Is classroom interaction research worth the effort involved?

New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 9 (1), 1-17.

Alton-Lee, A. G., Nuthall, G. A. & Patrick, J. (1987) Take your brown hand off my

book: Racism in the classroom. SET. Research Information for Teachers,

No.1, Item 8. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Nuthall, G.A. (1989). How can research on teaching help teachers. NZARE 1989

Conference Proceedings: Keynote Addresses, pp. 33-60, Wellington.

Alton-Lee, A.G., Nuthall, G.A., & Densem, P. (1990) "I only think of men ... I don't

think of women" SET Research Information for Teachers, Wellington: New

Zealand Council for Educational Research.

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Nuthall, G.A. & Alton-Lee, A.G.(1990). Research on teaching and learning: Thirty

years of change. Elementary School Journal, 90, 547-570.

Alton-Lee, A.G., Nuthall, G.A., & Patrick, J. (1993) Reframing classroom research:

A lesson from the private world of children. Harvard Educational Review,

63 (1), 50-84.

Nuthall, G.A. & Alton-Lee, A.G. (1993). Predicting learning from student experience

of teaching: A theory of student knowledge acquisition in classrooms.

American Educational Research Journal, 30 (4), 799-840

Nuthall, G.A. & Alton-Lee, A. G. (1994) Understanding how pupils learn. SET

Research Information for Teachers. (No.2, Item 3) Wellington: New Zealand

Council for Educational Research.

Nuthall, G.A. & Alton-Lee, A.G. (1995). Assessing classroom learning: How

students use their knowledge and experience to answer classroom

achievement test questions in science and social studies. American

Educational Research Journal, 32 (1), 185-223

Nuthall, G.A. (1997). Understanding student thinking and learning in classrooms. In

B.J. Biddle, T.L.Good, & I.F.Goodson (Eds.) The International Handbook of

Teachers and Teaching, pp. 681-768. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic

Publishers

Nuthall, G.A. (1999). The way students learn: Acquiring knowledge from an

integrated science and social studies unit. Elementary School Journal, 99 (4),

303-341.

Nuthall, G.A. (1999) Learning how to learn: The evolution of students’ minds

through the social processes and culture of the classroom. International

Journal of Educational Research, 31 (3) (whole issue)

Nuthall, G.A. (1999) The anatomy of memory in the classroom: Understanding how

students acquire memory processes from classroom activities in science and

social studies units. American Educational Research Journal, 36 (2) 247-304.

Nuthall, G.A. (2000). How children remember what they learn in school. Wellington:

New Zealand Council for Educational Research.